The most expensive game I bought was an older one, Zombicide Black Plague. Zombicide is considered a bit of a joke in the board game crowdfunding community, as the company CMON has for years since 2012 launched a "new" Zombicide game several times per year, about 16 core games and an endless stream of expansions. From a classic zombie theme, to fantasy zombies, cowboy zombies, superhero zombies, to science fiction zombies, every imaginable theme has a Zombicide version. Each game comes with a lot of plastic miniatures, but the variation and innovation in gameplay between the different versions is limited. Why did I buy it? Well, simply, I did previously not own any Zombicide game. And while the suggested retail price of Zombicide Black Plague is $109.99, and you can usually find Zombicide games on Amazon for around $90, at the fair I only paid €50. And Black Plague has a fantasy theme, which would be the Zombicide I am most interested in.

The stand I bought this had only a few games, each in large numbers and at a high discount to the suggested retail price. Basically a board game surplus store. Which brings me to the biggest game that I *didn't* buy: Descent: Legends of the Dark. Suggested retail price $174.95, available at the surplus stand for just €70. When the game came out, I was interested, but considered it to be too expensive. So for less than half price, I was considering it again. But as I wrote in my previous post, I have more campaign games than I can reasonably hope to play, and Descent would have been another campaign game. I also didn't like that Descent: Legends of the Dark uses a lot of 3D cardboard terrain, which isn't terribly stable. Looks nice on the table, but takes more time to set up, and isn't always practical if you end up sitting on the wrong side and a higher element blocks your view. So ultimately I decided that I don't need that game, even at this low price.

A similar story was the other game I considered buying: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Normal retail price €70, available at the fair (another stand) for €49, which is quite a good price for such a recent game. Now I have played SETI already twice and really liked the game. However, even the second game with people who had already played the game once still took 4 hours. Which means that SETI isn't a viable option for my weekly board game night, where I need to bring a game, set it up, explain it, play it, and put it back into the box in 3 to 3.5 hours. Now I have some groups with which I play board games privately at home, and don't have that time constraint. At which point another problem kicked in: Some of the groups I play with are German speaking, another group is French speaking. I can usually play English language games with both groups. There are also games which have only symbols, not text, on their cards and game material, with only the rulebook being language specific. But the copy of SETI was a German one, and there is a lot of German text on the cards, so I wouldn't be able to play it with my French group. So in spite of me liking the game, I didn't buy it.

What I did buy was a game where I had previously fallen into the language trap: Castle Combo. I have a previous game, Faraway, from the same company, and that game didn't have any text on the cards. As it is a French company, it was easier to get Faraway from France, and I have successfully played it with German speaking groups. So I made the mistake of assuming their next game, Castle Combo, would be the same, and bought the more easily available French version last year. It turned out that there was French text on the cards, so I never played the game at my German weekly board game night. So I picked up a German version for €20 at the fair in Dortmund.

Another game I bought specifically for the board game night was Tower Up. This is a relatively short and easy city building game that came out recently. The reason I was interested was that it seems to have a solid amount of player interaction, as every time you build, you also interact with the adjacent towers on the map, even if those aren't yours. I found that in recent years there has been a trend towards games I call "multiplayer solo" games, in which everybody works on his own game engine, with little interaction with other players, other than trying to score higher than them at the end. So I always look for games that have a good amount of interaction between players, because for me that interaction is where the interest of playing a board game around an actual table is.

Slightly more complicated is another purchase: Great Western Trail: El Paso. Or as I call it, Small Western Trail. Even the publisher describes it as "the perfect game for game nights when there is not enough time for its big brothers". The original Great Western Trail takes an estimated 15 minutes to set up, 45 minutes to explain, and then another 3 hours to play with 4 first-time players. The El Paso version is easier, thus quicker to set up and explain, and should play in half the time. Thus a much better fit with my board game night time requirements.

The concept of making an existing successful game smaller brings me to the last purchase, which I bought mostly because it seems so unbelievable how far that concept can be pushed: Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. I have the original Gloomhaven, a huge box that weighs 10.5 kg. Buttons & Bugs comes in a very small box, weighing just under 0.3 kg. It also cost under €20, while at another stand the newer Frosthaven complete box was sold for €280. Yes, Buttons & Bugs is only a single solo adventure, compared to the large number of scenarios in original Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. But for that price I was willing to see how similar a tiny version of the game could be to the original, or whether miniaturization to this degree was just silly.

Overall, the Spiel Doch! in Dortmund was a better shopping experience than the Spiel in Essen, simply because it was less crowded. My plan for Essen this year is to book a hotel more in the inner city, and take public transport to the fair. Instead of going for just one day, I want to stretch it out to two days, but less intensive each day. That way I also hope to profit from less crowded times, e.g. at the end of the day, rather than participating in the rush to get in. But it is kind of a last try. The Essen fair has become so successful that it is suffocating under its own success. Even just walking from A to B without looking at stands is a slow shuffle in a crowd, and that isn't much fun. On the other hand, I am not sure whether 2 hours drive to Dortmund for a fair that I can see everything in 2 hours is worth it. Big fair, small fair, both have advantages and disadvantages.